Tom Jones

The astronaut, not the Welsh singer, doesn’t like the new plan. It’s too late for me to respond (I have more painting, etc. to do tomorrow, and then fly back to LA late afternoon), but I’m sure that the commenters will.

[Update a couple minutes later before hitting the sack]

I will say one thing. This isn’t a plan to go nowhere. It’s a plan to go anywhere, and everywhere. And a lot more realistic one that we’ve had for the past five years.

43 thoughts on “Tom Jones”

  1. and the primary argument is about “safety” which as you have said and as any normal person knows, you must TEST safety, and the best method is by numbers, and improvement. Not lab tests.

    Ask toyota.

  2. This isn’t a plan to go nowhere. It’s a plan to go anywhere, and everywhere.

    A plan to go anywhere and everywhere with this agency IS a plan to go nowhere.

    Without the strategic direction provided by the Vision, the “new paradigm” will degenerate entirely into process, with hordes of bureaucratic committees engaged in “studies” and “roadmapping exercises.” Indeed, Lori Garver says that they are already planning the committee structures and memberships for the next round of paper spaceflight. We are in for another decade or two of viewgraph engineering.

    Looking on the bright side, we’ll get some really pretty artwork from all this. Paintings of people on Mars and drawings of people on asteroids to replace all the yellowing photographs of people on the Moon.

    And a lot more realistic one that we’ve had for the past five years.

    That’s a completely separate issue. Some of us think it is possible to implement the VSE under the existing budgetary constraints (e.g., Ray’s post at Vision Restoration, for example.)

    Many don’t realize that the VSE was a hard-won political concurrence. President Bush proposed it in 2004, but it was subsequently endorsed as national policy by two different Congresses under the leadership of two different parties, and both times it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. You don’t need to discard a hard-won policy battle for strategic direction to correct a failing implementation. This new “direction” (more accurately, the new lack of direction) replaces a carefully constructed strategic direction with (literally) nothing.

  3. Paul has a good point. The new directionless direction is not so much a program to go beyond LEO as a program to plan, prepare, dream about, and talk about going beyond LEO.

    To paraphrase Napoleon, “If you propose to go back to the Moon, for God’s sake, go back to the Moon!”

  4. While I understand your concern, Paul, the VSE has two big problems. First, it is associated with BUSH! Second, it has become so confused in the public mind with Constellation that it’s probably become impossible to separate the two. If you have a specific goal statement that you’d like to promote, I’m all in favor of getting the administration to adopt it, but I’m afraid that anything with a planet and timetable will be a non starter, because it will be viewed (like Apollo) as an open-ended budget commitment.

  5. anything with a planet and timetable will be a non starter, because it will be viewed (like Apollo) as an open-ended budget commitment.

    The “new path” is just as much an open-ended commitment as the VSE, but instead of ostensibly going to the Moon and beyond, it’s going nowhere (or everywhere, if you prefer). So what’s the difference?

    You know as well as I do what the agency is like. Look at it from a purely hypothetical viewpoint: Give NASA a bunch of money and no specific mission direction. What do think you’ll get in return?

  6. No unions or community organizers in orbit. No Party interests there, so Obama can’t be bothered. Rocket engineers are all old white men who vote Republican, in his eyes, so defunding space exploration is an obvious choice. More money for ACORN!

  7. Any plan that by it’s very nature is unaffordable to build and operate is a plan to go no where. Constellation was unaffordable to build and unsustainable to operate. Ares I was sucking all of the funding necessary to develop the other parts of the program like the lander. It’s costs had risen from a projected $14 billion to $35 billion in just a few years with, IMO, little confidence of staying below that number. In short, it was a plan to go no where.

  8. No unions or community organizers in orbit. No Party interests there, so Obama can’t be bothered.

    Actually, it’s more basic than that. The 3 big NASA centers most impacted by this decision are in Florida, Texas, and Alabama. Those states tend to elect Republicans.

  9. Instead of destinations-&-dates as goals, are there specific milestones-&-dates as goals? Even if no dates are specified, is there are a prize incentive structure for specific accomplishments? (I’m out of touch with the news due to a little bundle of joy who arrived a few days ago!)

  10. Patience, geez. That they haven’t announced timelines and details yet doesn’t negate that they’ve announced that they will announced timelines and details. 🙂

    The fantastic thing about this budget is the money it frees up for solar system exploration. When we send people to the moon, we’ll be able to send them to the right places, with the right resources for making more than a day-trip. Landing people needs to be done quickly, as simply as possible, so we can begin getting useful data back about how people can live in that kind of environment. But if you really want an iterative process that lets you know where the resources are, you’ll do unmanned exploration first.

    Constellation sucked all the air out of the room. The commercial incentive system will allow NASA to still get into space (and sooner then they would have with Ares), while laying the groundwork for non-governmental use of space as well. That infrastructure, like all economic systems have synergistic cooperation, will provide a foundation for cheaper BEO exploration as well.

  11. Government and private business have two different roles. Businesses are motivated by profit (which is a good thing when competition exists.) Government should be focused on our national interests which should be encouraging competition (not deciding business goals.)

    The government can play a role in research of enabling technologies but then should get out of the way.

    The best thing they could do is acknowledge and support private ownership of ET real estate and let the land rush begin.

  12. I like what I’m reading so far — I suppose fixed price contracts & real competition are a good enough incentive that prizes aren’t necessary anyway.

  13. I don’t see how cancelling Constellation == “no specific mission direction”. There is a jump in reasonsing there I’m not willing to take. Absence of a date to land on the moon/mars/etc in a long range plan does not equate to lack of a mission.

    Perhaps it really a statement of: “no specific mission direction [that I like][that buys me constituents]”.

    To help Rand out a bit,
    The problem with the VSE isn’t that it was associated with Bush or Constellation, but in its basic premise – that the government should have the authority to take from its citizens to give to special interests. Sending another handful of astronauts to the moon again isn’t going to protect US citizens’ rights, so they shouldn’t be looted to pay for it.

    The only proper place our government has in funding space activities is as a legitimate paying customer. Legitimate being those activities that aid in the protection of the rights of individuals, e.g. military spacecraft.

  14. Agree in principle, Ryan, but space programs are also tools of national policy, both internal and external, and until we create Libertarian Utopia the government wields the power to make it so.

    We have the space equivalent of the Navy, but we are only now developing a Merchant Marine.

    I also agree with “patience.” Jeez, check out the comments at NASAWatch, it’s the end of the world.

  15. Rand, how is the VSE’s association with Bush a problem when the VSE was (as stated by Mr Spudis) “subsequently endorsed as national policy by two different Congresses under the leadership of two different parties, and both times it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.”?

    How did the VSE suddenly become overburdened with “Bush-ness” after years of bipartisan support?

    The Obama plan is a disaster. They’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. The goal of “Moon, Mars and Beyond” could have remained with commercial space taking a much greater part in achieving that objective. But in reality the Obama admin could not care less about manned space, commercial or otherwise. It is all lip service to manned space exploration advocates while they go about their only true goal and that is to turn NASA into the Climate Change Research Agency.

  16. An overt long term “direction” for NASA such as the moon, mars or what not would have immediately succumbed to the powers that pork, likely via a HLV – preventing any significant governmental space development for another generation. Without reform NASA can not be assigned such tasks – NASA has never done sustainable or economic… This was the original failing of the VSE, (good plan, wrong agency).

    HLVs are all NASA is interested in, an HLV is the only way they can keep themselves separate from the real world. ARES I was a very big mistake for NASA – it directly showed that their launch vehicles cost ten times as much, took three times as long and were less safe. If only they had gone directly for the HLV instead they would have avoided such a direct comparison of their competence and perhaps kept the illusion of the emperors new clothes going for another generation.

    I am greatly pleased by the latest plan, it seems a great step towards reforming NASA back into the NACA of old that did great science and constructively nurtured the development of a great new industry. However, I also had high hopes for the VSE – and look how that got corrupted. But the new budgetary constraints may provide the previously non existent stick (means of enforcement), at last actually forcing the reform of NASA – nothing else has worked. The new NASA will now be accountable project by project, lots of little short term distributed goals and no more going a decade or two without a reality check. The direction and performance of NASA is now far more immediate than ever before.

  17. Ryan,

    I don’t see how cancelling Constellation == “no specific mission direction”

    Please enlighten me then: what is the new destination and what are the “mission” objectives?

  18. Paul,
    I did not make the assertion, the burden of proof still belongs to those who hold that opinion. I asked for justification.

    It is also not my problem that the assertion that was made requires the difficult task of proving a negative. I did not assert it.

    However, it may be done if it can be proven that none of the recently released information or interviews with administration officials have any reasonble inkling of a new mission or purpose for NASA. But that homework falls to those who carry the burden of proof.

  19. By the way I wouldn’t be suprised if this was the case, so I’d like to see the evidence. I think it is more likely that the Obama administration got it right (on Constellation) this time, much like a broken clock.

    Or it maybe Garver is smart, and the “O” is (lazily and/or mercifully) delegating.

  20. I’m a big Obama supporter but I suspect a bait and switch here.

    Cancel everything now and promise R&D plums for exotic R&D and innovative propulsion and the like (including some plums in the current 2010-2011 budget) but then fully zero out those budgetary line items no later than the 2012-2013 budget, after the November 2012 elections.

    Provide minimal funding for an Orion lite (or equivalent) on an Atlas V (or equivalent) and declare mission accomplished. Propose $3 billion per year for human spaceflight until ISS is splashed.

    Then ??? as its now POTUS #45’s problem.

    I could be wrong. Maybe Obama “gets it” about the need to fund the human expansion into the solar system but I am nervous.

  21. PS — I also believe NASA HQ will fight an SDLV solution tooth and nail and therefore I am NOT advocating for DIRECT at this time.

  22. I am with Ryan:

    Or it maybe Garver is smart, and the “O” is (lazily and/or mercifully) delegating

    I suspect that the motivation for the Obama administration is more about dispensing with a political liability and making a show of budget cutting and privatization – on something that is not important to them. It also gives them great material with regard to exposing the hypocrisy of a few southern republicans…

    Having said that, I remember talking to someone at NASA Ames who said that Hillary Clinton “got space”. Although, cynically, I could not say whether that means that she “gets space” or whether she “gets” people who “get space”.

  23. Definitely in agreement that this new policy is not some watershed well-thought-through policy carried out by the administration. It has a lot of potential, but without a guiding goal the implementation is going to be tricky. Also, the ‘bait and switch’ mentioned above cannot be discounted.

    There does seem to be a pretty big disconnect between camps who like the new policy and those who don’t. Effort to try and bring them together would not be wasted…

  24. Bill,

    I suspect Obama’s 2013 budget will be DOA as I doubt the Congress and White House as then constituted will feel in any way bound to it.

  25. Well, Rand, you know I disagree with you on the government’s role in space exploration. But here’s the equation I think you’re missing: for Obama,

    MOON = VEGAS.

    God help us if private companies ever did make it to the moon or the asteroids or “anywhere and everywhere” — under this regime, the government is likely to tax the heck out of anyone so wealthy and so profligate.

  26. I’m hoping this is Obama delegating to Lauri and not being that interested. Obama tilts his hand quite often when he says things that let you know what is really going on. On this particular subject I think he really does mean to give a good portion of NASA’s budget to education. He mentioned this very early on in his campaign.

  27. I did not make the assertion, the burden of proof still belongs to those who hold that opinion. I asked for justification.

    It is also not my problem that the assertion that was made requires the difficult task of proving a negative.

    Ryan,

    It’s not difficult at all. Look at the budget presentation NASA issued:

    Budget page

    There is no longer any mention of lunar return, merely a laundry list of commercial flights to ISS, some technology spending, and a couple of robotic missions. No destination is specified. No activities are described. No mission goals are listed. In short, the new “plan” is merely a catalog of spending. We don’t know from it where we are going, what we will do when we get there, or what benefit we gain from doing it.

    Contrast this with the Vision (and I mean the original VSE, I do NOT mean Constellation, which is NASA’s implementation of it). In the original VSE, we had a clear destination (Moon), a clear set of planned activities (learn to use lunar resources) and what we accomplish from them (establish sustainable human presence), and a clear benefit from doing all this (create a transportation system for routine access to cislunar space).

    A clear strategic direction in space (the VSE) has been replaced with nothing (the proposed budget).

  28. I could be wrong. Maybe Obama “gets it” about the need to fund the human expansion into the solar system but I am nervous.

    Bill, that’s an entirely plausible scenario. Question: How is it worse than the likely outcome of the current trajectory…?

    There are no pretty outcomes here, but this one at least has a chance if we continue to fight.

  29. Paul, if this budget results in orbiting fuel depots and routine commercial access to orbit, then it won’t matter that NASA doesn’t have an explicit destination or mission. It won’t have to. I have my own plans. So does Dennis Wingo. So do you. So do thousands or millions of others. Some will fail, and some will succeed. Not all eggs would be in one basket.

  30. Developing space faring enabling technologies seems to be the new direction of NASA – not flags and footprints. This seems a truly excellent change in direction to me. But then my interest is space settlement, not intangible space mission stunts to inspire the masses.

  31. Give NASA a bunch of money and no specific mission direction. What do think you’ll get in return?

    Not just that: also take them out of the launch business, make sure they do not have a spacecraft capable of going beyond LEO, only fund studies into an HLV that will have no payloads even if it is ever built. NASA manned spaceflight isn’t going beyond LEO anytime soon.

    In the mean time they have to keep ISS operational and ISS will probably be extended indefinitely. Budget cuts are also likely as time goes on. In the mean time the capabilities of commercial spaceflight will grow. It’s like the old WWII infantry tactic: find ’em, fix ’em, flank ’em, finish ’em.

    The only way NASA will be involved in missions beyond LEO is if it makes maximum use of the emerging capabilities of commercial players (launchers, crew vehicles, habs) and helps them grow those capabilities. We’ll likely not even have to think about landing on the moon for another fifteen years. The next fifteen years are for the reboot.

  32. I suspect that the motivation for the Obama administration is more about dispensing with a political liability and making a show of budget cutting and privatization – on something that is not important to them. It also gives them great material with regard to exposing the hypocrisy of a few southern republicans…

    I agree, this is likely what Obama and Rahm Emanuel care about. But I think Garver, Whitesides and Holdren are serious about rebooting NASA. Obama appears to be willing to let them try to pull this off. I doubt he’d be willing to fight very hard for it.

  33. Paul, if this budget results in orbiting fuel depots and routine commercial access to orbit, then it won’t matter that NASA doesn’t have an explicit destination or mission.

    Ed,

    It won’t. This budget is a prescription for endless studies and widget development. You won’t get one piece of operational flight hardware, let alone a collection of pieces to make up a real space transportation system.

    What’s the evidence for this? Past agency performance. For the last 30 years, NASA has had no specific strategic direction. But in that time period, they’ve spent in aggregate more than the entire Apollo program cost over the span of only 8 years. The difference? In the case of the former, we had a specific strategic direction. In the latter case, we didn’t.

  34. Holdren might be the place to “tell” whether this is real or a head fake to cover a drastic reduction in NASA’s human spaceflight budget, with the Space Frontier Foundation cheering them on.

    Holdren from April 2009 (in Nature via Space Politics):

    What the president said is our space programme has been drifting. What we had in the last administration was the articulation of a grand vision for going back to the moon and going back to Mars, but no budget to go with it. The consequences of that for NASA have been quite devastating, in terms of decimating the Earth sciences programme at NASA, decimating the aeronautics programme at NASA and putting at risk the constellation of Earth observation satellites.

    Clearly we need to reconcile NASA’s missions and budgets. We need to think about how we manage the right balance between manned space exploration and robotic space exploration. We need to manage the balance between looking up and looking down, the Earth observation part versus the space exploration part. We need to balance the aeronautics and the astronautics. That’s going to have to involve a new NASA administrator.

    Has Holdren had a change of heart? Any evidence of that? Cutting back NASA human spaceflight to a LEO crew taxi certainly will free up money for robotic science and Earth observation.

    Will things like depot R&D survive the Capitol Hill sausage machine? I don’t know.

    = = =

    Rand, I suggest the metaphor of doing a heart transplant. Surgeons should not take out the old diseased heart until a new donor heart is in the surgery suite and has been confirmed as ready for transplant.

    How soon will NASA be able to begin funneling money into CCDev?

    ISS is a single point of failure for this new plan. Without ISS there is no need for NASA to buy any COTS or commercial crew launches.

    Once Orbiter is shut down, the clock is ticking on ISS logistics. The old diseased heart is gone, we need the new one up and running, stat, as they say.

    Note that the heart transplant metaphor assumes that surgery is necessary and does not defend the pre-2/1/10 status quo.

    = = =

    My long term views haven’t changed. NewSpace needs revenue streams that do not pass through Uncle Sugar. Because Uncle Sugar will always be an unreliable funding source.

  35. PS – – If this new plan does go forward, my advice to NewSpace would be to obtain a clear commitment from NASA that CCDev vehicles shall be available for non-NASA destinations such as Bigelow habitats.

    Irrespective of what NASA does getting a non-NASA LEO destination launched as soon as possible is the best safeguard against a bait & switch.

  36. To paraphrase Napoleon, “If you propose to go back to the Moon, for God’s sake, go back to the Moon!”

    Once again, Mark, you miss the point.

    NASA is no longer proposing to “go back to the Moon.” It’s proposing to go *forward* to the asteroids, the Lagrange points, the moons of Mars, Venus — and possibly even a side trip to the Moon.

    Not to mention General Bomden’s goal of enabling thousands of people to visIt and live in Low Earth Orbit.

    I’m sorry if you and Paul see nothing of value in that, but NASA now has the chance to achieve it’s first, best destiny — to boldly go where no man has gone before. NASA has spent 50 years going in circles around the Earth. Now, it’s time to go beyond.

  37. ISS is a single point of failure for this new plan. Without ISS there is no need for NASA to buy any COTS or commercial crew launches.

    Good point, lets hope Bigelow gets a space station working in the not too distant future.

    This raises another point that has been worrying me for some time, there are a great many new space companies working on launch vehicles, but only Bigelow is working on space settlement payloads to go on them – not a competitive market. I also have serious reservations about the NASA heritage inflatable design – it barely takes any advantage of going inflatable and looks little more than a hideously expensive ISS module with an inflatable paint job.

    Much larger inflatable modules could be built that were much lighter and which were furnished in space. And the inflatable space station modules themselves could be a lot more modular…

    Just as rockets need to be revolutionized, so do their payloads. I would like to see just as many new space companies designing revolutionary payloads as are currently designing revolutionary rockets. Both costs must be dramatically reduced and there is little point in just cutting the cost of one of them.

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  39. My view is that the current plan, even with its absence of future direction is better. First, we can come up with a direction over the next year or two. Second, Ares I by itself damned Constellation in my eyes. First, it has NASA competing directly with commercial launchers. That alone justifies the extinction of Ares I. Second, the justification for Ares I and indeed the entire Constellation program was based on what I see as deception. The Orion capsule just so happened to be designed to be just out of reach of the Delta IV Heavy (requiring the “more capable” Ares I).

    The ESAS which both claimed that the Ares I was cheaper and safer than the EELVs. Years later when NASA was forced to release the appendices to the ESAS, we found that they made a number of unwarranted assumptions that in general heavily favored the Ares I design over everything else. The meat of the program was delayed a decade or more by plan. Any plan where I pay a lot of money now, just to get some interesting capability at some vague, distant date in the future, is a variation of a bait-and-switch.

    Finally, the execution of the development plan for Constellation was a joke. Ares I was years behind and wasn’t going to reach the performance numbers. Orion had to be redesigned repeatedly due to the failure of Ares I to meet performance numbers (and because nobody was allowed to insert extra margin into their designs).

    Constellation needed to go.

    The other question here is what to do about a dishonest president who is possibly very hostile to US development in space, both public and private. All Obama had to do was continue the Bush program with modest changes. Continue development of Constellation on the current budget (while shifting money to Earth-oriented observation as expected); end the Shuttle; and get the ULA to drop one of its two rocket lines (on the theory that the US doesn’t need a competitive commercial launch market).

    The presence of people like Bolden and Garver in the NASA administration indicates some degree of interest in pushing NASA towards becoming a more productive contributor to US efforts in space.

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